Automobilia: how recycling turns an old Bentley into a shooting brake

Fancy a shooting brake? Giles Chapman meets a team of British craftsmen breathing new life into an ancient art

SEVENTEEN per cent; no more and certainly no less. If it's any different, Rod Jolley can tell. Instinctively.

Rod Jolley and his team convert a 1940s MkVI Bentley: the panel-beater's art

That is the moisture level at which a block of seasoned ash is ready to be worked into a section of car body frame. Sometimes, the ash takes four years to reach this level in the wood store behind his Lymington workshop. Wouldn't another wood do? Jolley looks mildly alarmed.

"Well, I suppose you could use oak, beech maybe. But everyone wants an ash frame. It's traditional. It's British. It's springy - if you fitted an oak frame to a flexible chassis, it would break."

The expertise of Jolley and his team of eight craftsmen has been honed over three decades: Rod Jolley Coachbuilding is revered worldwide for the quality, detail and accuracy of its classic car bodywork. Collectors, museums and millionaire playboys queue up to commission it to recreate aluminium-alloy-and-wood bodies entirely by skilled hand and eye.

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Not that you will see much evidence of that once the cars leave Jolley's premises. The panelwork envelops the ash frame and the flawless metal will be wrapped in glittering paint.

But Rod Jolley's world is changing. He was asked recently to create an authentic 1940s shooting brake body on an old Bentley. Another customer saw it and wanted one too. When Jolley inserted a tiny photo of the half-finished car in an advert, he was deluged with inquiries - he says 20 potential shooting brake customers are jostling for his favours.

On a classic shooting brake, of course, the world gets to see the craftsmanship because, although the car uses a steel chassis, the entire rear section relies on a timber frame. "It is structural and cosmetic. The wood you see is doing a job," Jolley explains.

The Bentley-based car taking shape began life as a 1940s MkVI saloon, the first Bentley with a factory-made body. In effect, says Jolley, it is a mass-produced car; a nice one but not fantastic.

Attention to detail: Jason Rangecroff cutting ash

For the first shooting brake, the customer asked Jolley to find a dog-eared donor. That was a mistake. "There's only £5,000 difference between a good one and bad one," says Jolley, sagely. "The first one we did was so rusty it took twice as long to convert it as it should. So this time we started with a nice car."

The first thing to do was cut the whole of the rear body off: didn't it feel odd taking the angle-grinder to a perfectly sound British classic?

"We did feel quite guilty," he admits, "but there are so many around, it's not important. And I believed what we'd create would be better anyway. That's how half a reasonable Bentley went to the scrapyard. Its place was taken by a tree."

And it really was a tree. To build a shooting brake takes most of one whole, good-sized ash trunk, seasoned and cut into three inch-thick planks. This alone cost £1,000.

"There are only a few outlets; it's in short supply. We select the tree and then we store the log in an open-sided shed so it can breathe - air-dried wood is the only stuff to use."

Once the raw material is ready, construction begins. Often, Jolley works from photographs alone but, in this instance, he had a simple artist's impression to go at. Still, it's no blueprint.

"A computer-generated design would be useless for us," says Jason Rangecroff, Jolley's expert ash-framer. "It just couldn't pinpoint what the final design would actually look like."

Jolley chips in: "The only way to get a body shape dead right is to roll the car out of the workshop, walk 100ft away from it, turn round and study it. We really do improvise, making it up as we go along. For instance, a piece of wood can appear curved when it isn't. Only experience teaches you that. A lot of 1940s shooting brakes are quite ugly but we've taken a lot of trouble to put in double-curvature shapes for flowing lines.

"All the joints are neat mortise-and-tenon, all glued with any screws carefully concealed so no heads show. The wood-framed doors have brass edges so that, even if the ash expands or contracts, they'll never stick. Each brass frame took two days to make."

The panelwork is equally painstaking. A new steel rear roof had to blend in with the old part at the front so the car's original sunroof could be retained. Of course, you can't see the join. The curved wings and wheel spats are all made from aluminium-alloy. Rod Jolley uses two tons of it a year, shaped on a giant, G-shaped, English wheeling machine. Jolley shows me the smooth steel wheels between which the aluminium-alloy is carefully rolled. "These wheels are more important to us than our wives," Jolley half-jokes, stroking them lovingly.

All this craft adds up to a car to cherish, right? Wrong. Both Bentley shooting brakes built so far are destined for a busy life on large Scottish country estates, carrying labradors and fishing rods and Purdey shotguns.

"The Bentley's supple suspension and rugged engine make it ideal for tackling Scottish moorland. We use a good preservative inside, and all the visible wood will be sanded and varnished, but the car must have caked-on-mud removed to stop rot starting - the ash makes it almost a living thing," says Jolley.

In all, it takes 1,000 man hours to create a Bentley shooting brake like this, at around £100,000 for a four-door version with special fittings such as reclining seats, heated rear windows and a handling kit. But where else would you find a company boss who actually packs in 30 hours a week on the shopfloor, simply because he loves working with metal and wood? "Our customers come from all over the world because, I suppose, it's a British thing, an ancient art," he says.

But he gets something else out of it, too. The ash off-cuts mean Rod Jolley's home fires burn with the finest quality logs in the land.

A penchant for quality

Rejuvenation: Roger Saul's Bentley 4.25-litre started life as a Vanden Plas saloon but was converted into a shooting brake by Vincents of Reading in 1947

As founder and chief executive of Mulberry, Roger Saul has a passion for handmade British quality: his company's handbags and clothes are essential for the style-conscious connoisseur.

Which makes him a natural shooting brake aficionado. "Mine's a Bentley 4.25-litre that started life as a Vanden Plas saloon but was converted into a shooting brake by Vincents of Reading in 1947. I found it 10 years ago in the USA and, as I've always been fond of them, I waited patiently for the chance to buy it," he says.

Finished in light green, with red wire wheels, this Bentley cuts a dash at historic racing car meetings - where Roger races a vintage Alfa Romeo - and country picnics.

"It sounds like a boat as it bowls along, all creaky and alive," he says. "It has a lovely image but is also very useful. Until I sat on the tailgate and it collapsed."

Roger shoots in Scotland. "I have a friend up there with a Ford V8 Pilot shooting brake, and we use that," he says. "It goes like a bomb."

But when he's the host, the Bentley stays at home. "Well, a Range Rover really is the best tool for the job."

Shooting and the estate

The original shooting brake was an open, wooden, horse-drawn carriage able to carry shooting parties out into the country. As cars replaced horses, Britain's landed gentry moved over to motorised shooting brakes too, retaining the rural wooden look.

The station wagon originated in America and was similar in concept, although intended for operation by hotels as courtesy transport for railroad-travelling guests. They were usually home-made affairs but, in 1928, Ford was the first manufacturer to offer a station wagon as part of its line-up. They were often nicknamed "woodies".

An estate car was another term for a shooting brake - a utility vehicle for running country-house errands. After the Second World War, many Alvis and Lea-Francis cars were given coachbuilt, wooden-framed, estate car bodies as a tax dodge: classifed as commercial vehicles, no Purchase Tax (precursor to VAT) was payable.

Britain's first all-steel, factory-made estate car (as opposed to a delivery van with side windows) was the 1948 Standard Vanguard, but the Morris Minor Traveller of 1952-71, below, is our only mass-produced, wood-framed shooting brake. About a fifth of all Minors built were Travellers.